Fuel deal, positive basis for Iran talks - security analyst

London, July 3, IRNA – The Tehran Declaration with Turkey and Brazil has the potential to build a positive basis for the resumption of talks on Iran’s nuclear programme, according to a leading British security analyst.

“The real power of the agreement is in momentum that it could create to shift the dynamics of the relationship” between Iran and world powers involved in the dispute, said Paul Ingram, the executive director of the British American Security Information Council (Basic).

“It is the only agreement on the table today that could improve the relationship. And that’s crucial,” Ingram told IRNA.

“Beyond this was the fate of cancer patients in Iran, which I think does not receive sufficient attention here in the West,” he also said about the intentions of the fuel exchange agreement.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said this week that the resumption of talks should include building on the breakthrough Tehran Declaration when calling on so-called 5-plus-1 to clarify their aims in the negotiations.

Ingram said that it was “certainly helpful to clarify” the agenda of the talks as opposed to setting conditions, which was “unhelpful and was a strategy used by West on number of occasions in this dispute.”

“In the end, we are only going to achieve resolution if the broader picture is brought in to play. There isn’t really going to be a resolution if there is an attempt is made to limit to Iran’s nuclear programme itself,” he said.

A British official responded on Thursday to Ahmadinejad’s announcement of Iran’s willingness to resume talks in August by acknowledging that “the negotiating table is the only place where a satisfactory diplomatic solution can be achieved.”

"Constructive talks are certainly greatly preferable to sanctions and confrontation,” senior Foreign Office spokesman Barry Marston told IRNA. “Sanctions are only a means to an end,” he said.

Ingram, who writes extensively on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, said that although the signing of the Tehran Declaration did not delay or derail the latest round of sanctions, it had other positive outcomes.

“It certainly weakened the strategy that the Americans have been pursuing to isolate Iran,” he said. “Turkey and Brazil have most certainly moved away from their relatively close ties with the West as a direct result of this experience.”

In effect, Iran has already successfully and appropriately widened the talks and from its perspective it helps because of the lack of trust with the Americans, Basic’s director said.

His belief was that the Brazilians and the Turks should play a mediating role rather than being arbitrators, which would be unrealistic as each will have their own agenda.

Ingram’s argument has always been that a better approach for the US in what is essentially a political conflict with Iran would be achieved by “switching its strategy from isolation to beneficial cooperation.”

With regard to the undue attention being paid to Iran’s enrichment program as opposed to Israel already having an illegal arsenal of nuclear weapons, he said that it “certainly highlights double standards.”

But the security analyst expressed caution about the sensitivity of the issue, given that the West is “very close to Israel” and face their own powerful lobbies, particularly in the US.

Basic, which has offices and patrons on both sides of the Atlantic, was set up in 1987 with the aim of securing a “safe and peaceful world, one without the threat of war and nuclear destruction.”

Its main focus, as an independent research and advocacy organisation, is on British and American security and arms control issues as a means of creating a more stable and secure world./end